50 Best College Movies

There are rare American features, throughout the years, which do have something to say, humorous or serious, about the university experience. Here is our list of the top 50.

-Gerald Peary/Globe correspondent

Pictured: (l-r) Bruce McGill as Daniel Simpson 'D-Day' Day, Tim Matheson as Eric 'Otter' Stratton, Peter Riegert as Donald 'Boon' Schoenstein, John Belushi as John 'Bluto' Blutarsky, James Widdoes as Robert Hoover in the 1978 film "National Lampoon's Animal House."
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The Boston Globe/File

50. ‘College’ (1927)

Buster Keaton’s least successful feature still has a few superlative comic moments, as tiny frosh Buster tries his darnedest to make every muscle-bound varsity team. This comedy, interestingly, sets the stage for later campus movies equally suspicious of intellect, as bookish Buster is a turnoff to everyone, including his favorite girl, until he succeeds at sports.
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Tracy Bennett / MGM

49. ‘Legally Blonde’ (2000)

Reese Witherspoon (center, in pink) at Harvard Law School? Right! Is the Pope Jewish? This fluffy girl-out-of-water tale of a California sorority bubblehead who makes it big in the stuffy Ivy League is mostly Hollywood post-feminist pap. But it certainly found an audience, leading to a sequel and a Broadway musical.
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The Boston Globe/File

48. ‘Mr. Belvedere Goes to College’ (1949)

One of a series of popular 1940s films featuring Clifton Webb as a snobby, elitist genius. Here Belvedere goes to university as a middle-aged adult, and turns up his nose at campus antics when he becomes an unlikely boarder in a giddy sorority house.
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The Boston Globe/File

47. ‘Here Come the Co-Eds‘ (1945)

Abbott and Costello flee the police and take jobs as caretakers at a repressed woman’s college, where the head of the board of trustees enforces draconian rules of conduct. These are challenged by dancing and singing and a string of chaotic slapstick routines from the amusing comedy duo.
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John Medland / Cowboy Pictures

46. ‘Harvard Man’ (2001)

An autobiographical tall tale based on filmmaker James Toback’s druggy, promiscuous days at a well-regarded Cambridge university. The film, locally shot, is tamer, less scandalous, than Toback might have wished, but Adrian Grenier (left, with former Celtics guard and occasional actor Ray Allen) in the lead got some training for his sexy life on TV’s “Entourage.”
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Bruce Birmelin / Miramax Films

45. ‘Smart People’ (2008)

The travails of an unhappy, uncaring college English professor (Dennis Quaid) who, perhaps too predictably, regains his humanity and his touch in the classroom. And his book gets published! Anyway, Ellen Page (right, with Thomas Haden Church) is great as his elitist, Republican daughter.
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United Artists

44. ‘Heaven’s Gate’ (1980)

Sure it toppled a studio with its tossed-away millions in production costs, but Michael Cimino’s maligned epic is actually pretty decent, and even brilliant in its virtuoso act-one preface at the 1870 Harvard graduation, where leaden speeches segue into a truly dazzling, multi-camera dance on the green.

Hollywood stars Doris Day and Clark Gable battle it out in the classroom. She’s a devoted, outspoken journalism professor, he’s a hardboiled newspaperman who has snuck into her course because he’s attracted to her sauciness. They fly at each other when he, pretending to be a journalist novice, keeps correcting her lectures. This might be Gable’s best role in the last years of his life, and Day proves that she’s a mighty underrated screwball comedian.
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The Boston Globe/File

42. ‘Monster on the Campus’ (1958)

Another misguided science professor. This one messes in his laboratory with a prehistoric fish from Madagascar. The plot is borrowed from the Hollywood werewolf genre. The professor gets bit by the fish, turns into a hairy beast, and dead bodies appear mysteriously on campus. This low-tech, low-budget horror movie was made by enterprising Jack Arnold, director of “The Incredible Shrinking Man.”
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Patty Arpaia/Associated PRess

41. ‘National Lampoon’s Van Wilder’ (2002)

If you’ve got to have one proudly brainless college comedy, let it be this one, with the crass, coarse, but ever-amiable titular hero (a smooth Ryan Reynolds, pictured) in his seventh year of hedonistic fun at Coolidge College. The other students dig Wilder and his Falstaffian excesses, the pompous administration connives to force him out on his lazy butt. A lame story? This movie was so popular that it prompted two even stupider Van Wilder sequels.
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The Boston Globe/File

40. ‘Rudy’ (1993)

It’s corny, shameless American Dream stuff, but audiences love this unpretentious story of the stubborn little guy (Sean Astin) who, against the odds, wills himself onto the Notre Dame football team.
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Bob Marshak/Columbia Pictures

39. ‘Mona Lisa Smile’ (2003)

A bit stodgy, Mike Newell’s feature still gets points for centering on an admirable professor. It’s a miscast Julia Roberts (left) as a 1950s art historian passing on her unorthodox wisdom to impressionable Wellesley students, Kirsten Dunst and Maggie Gyllenhaal (second from left, with Kirsten Dunst) among them.
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The Boston Globe/File

38. ‘Real Genius’ (1985)

Martha Coolidge’s comedy is dated, but there still are enjoyable moments in this film about precocious science nerds at a high-powered California university who, not knowing it, are involved by the nefarious dean in a paramilitary plot involving high-tech weaponry. Val Kilmer stars as a rising-star science student who also, far more important, is a slovenly party animal.
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Associated PRess

37. ‘Knute Rockne All-American’ (1940)

A classic performance from Pat O’Brien as the legendary Notre Dame football coach. This is the one where callow Ronald Reagan (pictured) is George Gipp, an athlete dying young; and Rockne inspires his team at halftime against Army with the immortal challenge: “Win just one for the Gipper!”
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The Boston Globe/File

36. ‘One on One’ (1977)

Directed by the talented Lamont Johnson, this tale of a small-town basketball star (Robby Benson) lost in the big business of campus sports is perhaps the best of the athlete-goes-to-college subgenre, even with the clichéd subplot of the beautiful female tutor who rescues him.
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Anthology Film Archives

35. ‘The Gambler’ (1974)

The screenplay for director Karel Reisz comes from James Toback of “Harvard Man,” a self-annointed expert on campus vice. Toback updates Dostoevsky’s Russian-set novella into an American melodrama about a New York literature professor (James Caan, center) hooked on betting and gambling—when he’s not astutely lecturing his class on the poetry of William Carlos Williams.
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Gene Page / Universal Pictures

34. ‘Sydney White’ (2007)

A PG-13 film with spirit, and, within the confines of a most conventional story, a persuasive lesson for adolescents. Amanda Bynes (center) goes off to college and learns that she’s just fine when she’s rejected from a Stepford-like sorority . She’s far better off hanging with unfashionable dorks like herself, who get off reading comic books.
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The Boston Globe/File

33. ‘The Revolutionary’ (1970)

Here’s an obscure picture with a coterie reputation, an austere, Kafkaesque tale of student protest starring, as the reluctant left-winger, a post-“Midnight Cowboy” Jon Voight, decades before he made his Tea Party turnaround.
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The Boston Globe/File

32. ‘The Absent-Minded Professor’ (1961)

This Disney chestnut involves old pro Fred MacMurray as dizzy Professor Brainard, who literally forgets to show up at his own wedding. On the other hand, he invents an anti-gravity substance, which he calls “flubber,” that let the college basketball team to leap through the air and precipitates some amazing moves at a campus dance. For more, check out the 1963 sequel, “Son of Flubber.”
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Columbia Pictures

31. The Strange One’ (1957)

Calder Willingham, later the estimable scriptwriter of “The Graduate” and “Little Big Man,” provided here the screenplay adaptation of his own novel and play, “End as a Man.” This tough, superior film takes place at a Southern military academy much like the Citadel where the uniformed student body is lorded over by an intimidating campus bully (Ben Gazzara).
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The Boston Globe/File

30. ‘The Accused’ (1949)

A very rare campus-set “film noir,” and a good and exciting one. Loretta Young plays a professor hounded by a male student, who tries to rape her. In self-defense, she murders him and then, a fatal mistake, decides to cover up the crime.
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Gemma Lamana / Paramount Pictures

29. ‘Orange County’ (2002)

A bright Southern California high school student (Colin Hanks, right with Schuyler Fisk) is cheated out of going to Stanford, so he drives north with his girlfriend and perpetually fried brother (Jack Black, who else?) to rectify the situation. There’s an uproarious evening in Palo Alto, but there’s also the kindness of a writer in residence (Kevin Kline), encouraging the student in his literary ambitions.
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The Boston Globe/File

28. ‘The Sterile Cuckoo’ (1969)

Filmmaker Alan J. Pakula’s sweet, gentle campus romance is between a shy, inexperienced freshman and a kooky young girl (Liza Minnelli). Gradually, she proves too mentally unstable, and her Cub Scout of a boyfriend must move on, one of the saddest college breakups in cinema.
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The Boston Globe/File

27. ‘Drive, He Said’ (1971)

Sex, drugs, foggy chatter, and basketball are jumbled together in this felicitous take on Jeremy Larner’s novel. The first-time filmmaker is Jack Nicholson, and this film is a sublime candidate for restoration, revival, cult status.
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Bruce McBroom / Universal Studios

26. ‘The Nutty Professor’ (1996)

This Eddie Murphy (pictured) remake is very amusing in its own right, just a step behind the Jerry Lewis original. Murphy is A-OK strolling about campus as the rotund Professor Klump, but the really genius scene is at home, when he singlehandedly portrays all the rowdy Klumps at the dinner table.
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David Lee / Weinstein Company

25. ‘The Great Debaters’ (2007)

Denzel Washington (pictured) directed this important saga of African-American history, celebrating the debate team of Wiley College in 1930s segregated Texas. Too bad that the film culminates in a fictitious debate against Harvard. In real life, there was a clash between Wiley and the University of Southern California, formidable enough.
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Richard Foreman / Dreamworks Pictures

24. ‘Old School’ (2003)

Todd Phillips’s practice film for the “The Hangover” puts in motion his key mantra: that married men want to be boys, pining for the dude camaraderie and, yes, the beers and chicks of bachelorhood. His three post-30 amigos — Will Ferrell (center, in green), Luke Wilson, Vince Vaughn — set up a fraternity house on the edge of campus so they can party like undergrads. Sexist, yes, but Ferrell and Vaughn sure are funny.
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The Boston Globe/File

23. ‘Good News’ (1947)

Here it is, “College: The Musical,” a colorful MGM remake of an earlier 1930 song-and-dance film about innocent, pie-eyed 1920s campus life. The librarian (June Allyson) falls hard for the football hero (Peter Lawford), and the predictable on-and-off romance—there’s a vamp in the way!—is surrounded by a classic score including “The Best Things in Life Are Free.”
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Museum of Modern Art / Film Stills Archive

22. ‘The Wild Party’ (1929)

The first talkie from the effervescent “It” girl, Clara Bow, takes place in a girls’ college, where flapper Clara majors in Jazz Age hoofing. Her educational attitude shapes up when she becomes enamored of a new, serious teacher (Frederic March). Dorothy Arzner was the only women directing in Hollywood between 1927-1943. The tight, sensual relationship of the female students reveals Arzner’s shadowy lesbian subtext.
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Reuters

21. ‘Good Will Hunting’ (1997)

It’s improbable if not impossible that an untrained Southie janitor could do advanced algebra, but who is going to argue with the unfathomable success of Gus Van Sant’s schmaltzy MIT-set tale? It put young Matt (Damon, left with Robin Williams) and Ben on the movie map, leading, respectively, to the Bourne connection and J-Lo.
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Paramount Pictures

20. ‘Love Story’ (1970)

Yes, it’s cheesy, and disease-of-the-week, and yet there’s something undeniably touching about this fated romance of a Harvard blueblood (Ryan O’Neal, left) and a working-class Radcliffe girl (Ali MacGraw, right). If you can get past the nonsense adage, “Love never means having to say you’re sorry,” check out the Harvard settings, from a halcyon time before film crews were banned from the campus.
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The Boston Globe/File

19. ’The War at Home’ (1979)

A superb documentary tracing the shifts over a decade at the University of Wisconsin at Madison from straight and square to a center of protest, both pacifist and violent, against the war in Vietnam. One of the co-directors, Barry Alexander Brown, became Spike Lee’s regular editor.
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The Boston Globe/File

18. ‘The Male Animal’ (1942)

An unusual college comedy of ideas, from a Broadway play by humorist James Thurber. An English teacher (Henry Fonda) at a football-mad Midwestern university reads to his class a death-house letter from Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Afterward, the conservative board of trustees wish to fire him as a “Communist.” The teacher’s line of defense, brave for Hollywood, is standing strong for freedom of speech.
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Comedian Rodney Dangerfield (second from left) is a charismatic presence as a zillionaire businessman off to college for the first time. There’s a tiresome Hollywood lesson that Dangerfield must learn, that “everything can’t be bought,” but it’s balanced by super performances from Ned Beatty as a servile administrator and Sam Kinison as an insane professor. Plus, there’s a cameo by Kurt Vonnegut.
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20th Century Fox

14. ‘The Paper Chase’ (1973)

The most infamous professor in all of cinema is John Houseman’s tweedy, imperious, insulting Harvard Law teacher. Will he win a battle of wills with a stubborn first-year student (Timothy Bottoms), who is also in a love affair with the professor’s prized daughter? More important, will the student be co-opted by the patrician, establishment values of the Ivy world?
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Columbia Pictures

13. ‘The Way We Were’ (1973)

It’s only the first section of Arthur Laurents’s screenplay which takes place at college, but what a unique act one slipped into a mainstream Hollywood movie. Barbra Streisand’s Katie (right) is taken seriously as a Jewish campus activist, and Robert Redford’s Hubbell (left), in a classroom scene, is treated with respect when he reads aloud a literary short story.
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Paramount Pictures

12. ‘The Nutty Professor’ (1963)

The French adore this Jerry Lewis-directed movie, in which Jerry (pictured) plays a clumsy, introverted, bucktoothed science teacher who, after gulping down a magic formula, transforms into a coed-obsessed, vainglorious lounge singer. This movie is funny and clever, and Lewis is delicious sliding between the two parts. Does anyone care that the good professor is nutty for one of his female students?
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Embassy Pictures

11. ‘The Sure Thing’ (1985)

Rob Reiner’s beloved road trip comedy puts quarreling students John Cusack (right) and Daphne Zuniga (left) on the highway, but their estrangement ends, to our satisfaction, with true love back at the university. The deus ex machina is provided by a capable, caring professor, played with aplomb by Viveca Lindfors.
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Suzanne Hanover / Universal Pictures

10. ‘Accepted’ (2006)

Eccentric, intelligent kids rejected from college open their own ersatz university in a painted-over mental institution. Steve Pink’s winning Hollywood satire has teeth, for the fake campus actually has a philosophy, part Rousseau, part ‘60s hippie, by which students teach and/or take whatever courses interest them, to heck with a formal curriculum. For example, there’s a class with comedian Lewis Black delivering tirades against big business.

Mark Kitchell’s excellent documentary about campus politics on the University of California campus, from the Free Speech Movement through anti-war protests and the Black Panthers, with Joan Baez and Huey Newton on the left, and then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan on the unapologetic right.
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Columbia Pictures

8. ‘School Daze’ (1988)

Spike Lee based this fictional film set at a black college on his own days at Atlanta’s Morehouse University. In contrast to the apolitical agenda of most studio college films, Lee’s feature is an audacious, insider’s critique of what’s politically wrong at an African-American university, starting with fraternity-sorority prejudice against darker-skinned students.

A savvy rebuttal to “Animal House,” Jeff Kanew’s pro-nerd feature seemed radical then, in a time before Comic-Con and new-media geeks. It’s still a hoot to watch the outcast computer science majors, in an alliance with a dorky woman, an Asian, a gay man, and a black fraternity, foil the odious white-boy Greeks.
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Frank O’Brien / Kino International

6. ‘Harvard Beats Yale 29-29’ (2008)

Kevin Rafferty’s documentary reminiscence of a legendary 1968 football game, with the pigskin participants from both Ivy teams providing wry, savory commentary. Even non-gridiron folks will relish the company of the now-60ish players, including ex-Harvard lineman Tommy Lee Jones.
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The Boston Globe/File

5. ‘Higher Learning’ (1995)

“Boyz in the Hood” director John Singleton masterminded this sinfully overlooked tale about race relations at a contemporary university. Singleton segues between white and African-American students, showing their glaringly different perspectives on the same issues. The beautifully choreographed interracial cast includes Omar Epps, Ice Cube, and Jennifer Connelly.
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The Boston Globe/File

4. ‘Horse Feathers’ (1932)

A wonderfully loopy, anarchic Marx Brothers film in which Groucho (pictured) is cast as the new president of Huxley College. He’s there to save the sinking school by hiring ringer footballers. The behemoth athletes morph into Chico and Harpo, and the rest is insanity, including Groucho’s hilarious wooing of the campus widow. The fourth Marx Brother, Zeppo, plays Groucho’s idiot son, in his 12th year as a Huxley undergrad.
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The Boston Globe/File

3. ‘The Freshman’ (1925)

Bespectacled comedian Harold Lloyd (pictured) goes to college, desperate to be popular, in this silent masterpiece, as genuinely side-splitting as it is sweet and charming, whether Lloyd is practicing his goofy, patented handshake or running wild in an uproarious football game.
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Merrick Morton / Colombia Pictures

2. ‘The Social Network’ (2010)

A major filmmaker, David Fincher, and a splendid screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin, fix their sights on a gaggle of snarky, genius Harvard types vying for financial control of cyberspace. Here’s where the Oscar should have landed, “The King’s Speech” losing to Facebook.

If you’re going to be politically noxious and flagrantly incorrect, then do it with audacious style and flair. Filmmaker John Landis charms even the most priggish into chortling along with the outrageous antics of a devilish Greek house, and the amoral frat boys are raised to the level of rakish wits in a Restoration comedy.